The World’s First Commercial Hoverbike Has Arrived

This electric-powered quadcopter is trying to change the way we get around

A Russian startup called Hoversurf has designed the first commercial hoverbike called the Scorpion-3. The fully-manned quadcopter aims to make flying accessible to everyone.

The bike is electric-powered and combines a motorcycle seat with drone technology, a combination that enables both amateurs and professionals to navigate it. Hoversurf designed it to resemble a dirt bike that is able to surf through the air at a maximum of 10 meters.

The electric craft has built-in software that enables both manual and automated control for riders who want some extra assistance. The bike can carry up to 120 kilograms and can reach speeds of up to 50 kilometers per hour. While the hoverbike is definitely in the an extreme sports category at the moment, Hoversurf hopes that in the future the device could become an everyday form of transport.

eBay principal engineer and Web platform lead Senthil Padmanabhan will speak at the Google AMP Conference taking place at the Tribeca 360 in New York next week and plans to detail the company's integration of AMP in commerce.

This Glitter Can Make Almost Any Item Solar-Powered

The material developed at Sandia National Laboratories hopes to make the clean power source more accessible than ever

Although solar energy has been slow to uptake in most cases, the technology only continues to get better. Sandia National Laboratories is getting closer to creating flexible and tiny solar cells that can be fastened onto different items, such as devices and satellites. Made up of crystalline silicone, these solar particles are anticipated to be less expensive and more efficient than other solar technology available out in the market. The lab is calling it: solar glitter.

Sandia lead investigator Greg Nielson explains, “Eventually units could be mass-produced and wrapped around unusual shapes for building-integrated solar, tents and maybe even clothing,”

The potential reduction of costs is due to the fact that these cells are so small, requiring little material to perform well. It also can be folded just like paper, making it easy to transport. With the solar industry only growing with time, this new technology only adds to the potential of this alternative energy source.

The software wants to reshape the way we trade digital currency, one that promotes collaboration rather than individual gains

You probably remember when Bitcoin was first invented in 2009 as a digital currency that requires no banks, no transaction fees, and totally anonymous merchandising. It’s purchased and sold on online marketplaces, allowing Bitcoins to retain a monetary value, and use encryption techniques to regulate how units are generated and transferred to recipients. It operates independently of a central bank and mints, but it’s still recognized as a viable source of monetary compensation in many spheres. More and more organizations are accepting the use of Bitcoins as currency. This digital currency may seem a little unorthodox, but the usefulness of the invention is clear, as is the potential for growing online transactions. For that reason, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that a South African technologist named Richard Craib began using his artificial intelligence hedge fund Numerai to issue a brand new digital currency that works for traders on Wall Street.

At 29 years old, Craib used the same tech that inspired Bitcoin to create a crypto-finance unit called ‘digital tokens.’ It builds up internet-based assets that can be used to trade and gain interest just like you’d do on Wall Street. It’s particularly good for crowdsourcing, encouraging people to work together online to build individual and group wealth.

As of now, the digital tokens only work through the existing hedge fund. Numerai chooses all the trades based on several thousand algorithms that have been submitted by anonymous data scientists. Each algorithm competes to create the most advanced trading algorithm with digital tokens as a reward for their success.

According to a cover article on Wired, Numerai’s digitally powered trade is quite elegant and complex. The system is designed so that data scientists can’t cheat or try to get too far ahead of other individual participants. It’s based around a design to promote trade rather than individual gain.

“Numerai encrypts its trading data before sharing it with the data scientists to prevent them from mimicking the fund’s trades themselves,” the Wired article reports. “At the same time, the company carefully organizes this encrypted data in a way that allows the data scientists to build models that are potentially able to make better trades.”

This has been going on quite successfully for more than a year, and it’s even managed to attract Howard Morgan, founder of Renaissance Technologies, and other marquee backers ensconced in tech-powered trading.

Craib began this affair when he noticed serious drawbacks in the way trades take place. As a hedge fund manager, he saw first-hand the back-stabbing methods of getting to the top with no regard for success in the hedge fund as a whole. This manner of participation isn’t good for the performance of individual trades or the success of the hedge fund.

Before Craib started his digital tokens, individual competition ruled. As the best scientists won, they had little incentive to bring in more talent that could benefit the system and get it to steadily grow. If successful data scientists were to spread the word about what Numerai was doing for them, they would only add to the competition that was already chipping away at their winnings.

Craib wanted to see the platform boost group wealth and is hopeful that a focus on using the digital tokens for crowdsourcing venture capital and similar endeavors would make it more of a collaboration rather than a competition. If it’s successful, we’ll be looking at more of an open-source trading platform rather than a closed, exclusive venture that only the elite can benefit from.

To try to beat the competitive edge that this hedge fund once had, Numerai gave out a million tokens called Numeraire to 12,000 scientists. This system is still competition based, but the incentives are a little different. The better their software trades perform, the more currency they rake in. They’ll receive more of these digital tokens as well as some bitcoin that can be used for real compensation. If their transactions fail, they lose their digital tokens, and they don’t receive any digital funding.

It makes it so that participants can’t virtually cheat the system. They have to build models that will perform well in the real trade, not just in their preliminary test. It requires that people work together and spread the word. The more talent that’s incorporated into the trade platform, the better people will do with their online trades.

Craib hopes that this open-source platform will change the way that greed runs our society. Rather than focusing on building individual wealth, traders will have a stronger focus on boosting the economy as a whole and helping organizations to stay afloat in a difficult market. It will help to boost artificial intelligence acceptance and performance in the market.

In all, Craib says that his method of focusing on the tech rather than on the money will make all the difference. “Why is tech positive-sum and finance zero-sum?” Craib asks.

It’s still a little early to determine whether or not this technology and open source trading platform will do all the Craib hopes it can do. It’s also hard to tell if it will have applications beyond the Numeraire platform.

If it has the effect Craib wants, it will teach Wall Street trading to take more of an open source approach. In a software company, collaboration is the food on which it grows. Individual investments don’t do enough to build it up, and the company becomes unstable as a result. Organizations grow better when there’s collaboration, and if people on Wall Street could learn to work better together, the stock market would be a much stronger beast.

Additionally, this platform could open more doors toward online trading. This use of positive reinforcement makes trading on a mass scale more accessible to individuals and organizations of all sizes rather than just the elite. Those with talent and ingenuity can make their way in the trading world. They don’t necessarily need a lot of initial capital to find success.

Time will tell whether or not the Numeraire way of trading will catch on the way Bitcoin did, but if it does, we’ll see some potentially promising changes in the way Wall Street does business.

Acquiring new customers isn't the biggest challenge. Some point to network ad fraud. Marketers have their hands full trying to determine the types of rewards, search, social and video media that will keep consumers coming back.

Audi Creates Sandbox Tracks Of Their Own Design

The auto brand has created the Enter Sandbox program to have users create their own courses and test drive them using a VR device

Audi wants to bring out the creativity of a driver’s inner child by using the Enter Sandbox program. The program combines the basic layout of a sandbox with a real-time virtual reality device to have users test drive an Audi vehicle. The sandbox tracks get modified in real time using a Kinect depth sensor overlooking it. This sensor transfers all changes to the program, accounting for the bumps in the road to provide an authentic experience with the VR device.

In the future, the technology displayed by Audi shows in Enter Sandbox could give engineers a better idea of how their designs operate in a variety of terrains and what they need to change.